I have a friend with an impressively massive beard, which he's frequently complimented for. However, two separate women have indicated to me in private that they find the beard unattractive. This, together with other personal experiences, leads me to believe that number of compliments can be a misleading metric for looking good.
Specifically, I think standing out will give me more compliments, pretty much independently of whether it improves my attractiveness, and it will be hard to tell if I'm actually becoming less attractive. I'm therefore focusing mostly on (b).
You're right that there are several small improvements I could make with relatively low upkeep. Things like buying less worn clothes, and that could also be cheap if bought used. I already work out regularly for health reasons, so I'm already doing decently in that department.
I think the long-term cost mainly comes from ending lots of unattractive habits that I've grown used to for practicality reasons. If appearances is as important as the answers to this post has made it sound, I definitely need to end these habits. Things like
I found the post you linked interesting.
I agree with your point about my daily experiment being weak. It's frustrating that practically validating the importance of appearance for my individual case seems hard. Even in the extreme case, if I put in years of work and thousands of dollars into improving my appearance, I don't trust my evaluation of whether it was worth it to escape the sunk cost fallacy.
This aligns fairly well with my current model. While I don't worry much about how I appear, I do care about my health (hence why I'm reasonably fit), and I have high self-esteem which I think translates to some confidence-flavored energy.
I had not seen that post. It was very useful, thanks!
How did you figure out that you were wrong?
What I gather is that you improved your appearance, and then you detected significantly better outcomes in social situations? In which situations was this change most apparent?
How strong did you find this "stat buff"? I have no doubt that buying some new t-shirts is a net good for me, and I'm essentially going in this general direction already because of the dating argument. However, after going from poor appearance to OK appearance, it is much less clear to me how far I should optimize. Should I stop wearing bike helmets? Should I aim for a lower body-fat percentage than what is purely healthy?
Your advice is likely directionally correct, and a nerd like me is unlikely to actually overshoot and care too much about appearances, but I'm still curious.
If I understand you correctly, essentially you're saying that the practical effect in my daily life would be that everyone would treat me slightly better. So for example when I ask a friend or colleague to do something with me, they are 10% more likely to accept, which is significant over time, but hard to separate from natural variance. This seems plausible, but hard to verify.
Regarding natural variance I think the variance is significant, but in the downward direction.
Essentially some of my t-shirts are not particularly well designed, covered in sponsors, say specific years like 2016 on them, and the print is visibly worn out from years of laundry. Contrast this to a plain dark t-shirt that I think looks OK, and I think there is a significant difference.
Similarly my hair typically gets cut to about 4cm on top and 1cm on the sides, which I think looks OK right after the haircut. However, after growing about 1 cm per months for 3 months, it starts covering my ears, pube-like hairs grow in the back of my neck, and the ends of my hairs are splitting.
Nevertheless, this variance might not be enough to detect spread out overall treatment changes like the one described in the first paragraph.
My alternative hypothesis is that looks matter a lot for first impressions, but are replaced by stronger status indicators when someone gets to know me better. This would align with how looks matter the most in cases where strangers judge you, like being on stage or in person marketing.
But in this world, the people I interact with daily are people I interact with regularly, so they have stronger signals of social status that override their looks-based initial impression, and hence looks don't matter much in my daily life (outside of meeting new people like dating).
Doing things you're bad at can be embarrassing. But the best way to get better is usually to practice.
I'm bad at humming. Since my voice changed in my teens, I essentially haven't hummed.
Sometimes social situations call for humming, like referencing a tune. Then I can either hum badly, which can result in "I can't tell what tune that is because you're bad at humming". Or I can not hum. So I rarely hum.
From my perspective, practicing yields an improvement in my skill from "bad" to "slightly less bad". However, an uninformed onlooker would update their estimate of my skill from their prior "probably average" to "pretty bad", leading them to think less of me than if I had simply avoided the situation.
If people see me doing something that I'm good at, like doing pull-ups, I often get compliments. When they see me doing something I'm bad at, like humming, I get embarrassed. I suspect this results in a general tendency to practice things you're good at, and neglecting practice of shortcomings.
I've decided to put in some deliberate practice into things I'm embarrassingly bad at. I reasoned that improvement is usually faster in the beginning, with lots of low-hanging fruits. So upgrading skills from "bad" to "OK" should be relatively cheap.
So far I've managed to remove the worst voice cracks when humming certain notes (that G3 is tricky for me), learned to swallow small pills, and gotten somewhat comfortable in the deep end of the swimming pool, in the span of a week. While I don't expect to receive any positive reinforcement from these skills, I think it has been a good use of my time, and you can consider doing the same for some of your own shortcomings.
I've seen competitive programming problems are often embedded in funny stories, for example Forest of Celery and more generally most ICPC-related problems. However, I haven't seen the same for competitive math problems.
The closest I can think of off the top of my head is a fair number of math puzzles involving absurdities such as killing an infinite number of prisoners and colorful hats, like "infinite number of prisoners and hats" puzzle.
Edit: Made links clickable.
Empirical observation: healthy foods often taste bad.
Why do my taste buds like fat and sugar, instead of a vegetable smoothies? Here's my half-serious attempt at applying formal reasoning to explain the phenomenon.
Proposition.
At a food consumption equilibrium, all healthy foods have significant downsides (tastiness, price, ease of preparation, etc.).
Proof.
We say that a food is "healthy" if the average person would benefit from eating more of it.
Consider an arbitrary food X which doesn't have significant downsides.
We assume that food consumption is at an equilibrium, such that the better a food's overall profile, the more of it people will choose to eat.
Any food is toxic (i.e., not healthy) in large enough quantities, which means the equilibrium consumption is finite. In particular, the average consumption of food X is at a finite equilibrium.
However, food X was assumed to have no significant downsides. So if it was healthy, people would eat more of it. But on the contrary, X is at an equilibrium. Hence, food X cannot be healthy.
QED
As an example, take salt. Salt is necessary for human survival. And it tastes good! But now most people eat too much of it, so it's generally considered unhealthy.
I think the weakest point of my proof is the "food consumption equilibrium" assumption, and the non-standard definition of "healthy" foods. But the subject didn't originally seem mathable at all, so I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.